Bloody Disgusting reports that Universal Pictures is planning to restart Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and is in close negotiations with Robert Downey Jr. to play Lestat.

There’s no word on whether this will be a reboot of one of the previously-filmed novels or a new entry in the franchise, but the choice of Downey should attract a lot of attention.

As Shadow Jack commented dryly when I told him about the choice of star, “Because he just does everything better.” He’s certainly done something…interesting…with the new Sherlock Holmes movie. (If you haven’t seen the trailer for that, it’s here. I suspect that if you hooked a rotor up to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s grave you’d have energy too cheap to meter.)